In industries that provide visual images, such as the film industry, photography, videos, etc., images are often post processed and enhanced. Post processing may include a number of procedures that alter the original state of the image or film. In post processing, it is often useful to break images up into constituent sub-images. The constituent sub-images may include, for example, color components or strips. This may include three-strip processing, such as Yellow, Cyan and Magenta (YCM) processing.
To store a film for a long time and reduce the color fading speed, a color film is separated into three-color components, Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow. Each color component is stored on a reel. A color film is stored in three separate mono color reels. When the time comes to re-release the film, or some other application, the three-color components need to be recombined. With time, the film geometrically shrinks or distorts. The shrinking is different in different portions of the reel and certainly different from reel to reel. These three components need to be registered to get a correct color film at least because the distortion is not linear over a print. Such distortion makes the registration difficult.
The three mono color strips need to be recombined by registering or aligning the colored component images. Quality control (QC) is needed to make adjustments and corrections on the registered image. However, the QC task is very difficult or even impossible since three component images may have significant non-linear distortions and they are rarely re-matched by hand. An automatic three-strip registration can make the processing much easier, but currently cannot be guaranteed to be consistently aligned properly. A QC is required for the final check, and correct any mismatched edges.
Because the nature of the YCM registration, a need exists for providing an improved registration system and method that permits easy and efficient quality checking.